Microsoft Cloud Partners Nearly Double Profits, Growth: Study

Moreover, “IDC’s data reveals that businesses prefer to buy end-to-end IT solutions from a single cloud vendor and want to work with a company with whom they have an established relationship,” Roskill added in a statement. “With Office 365 now on a $1 billion annual revenue run rate and Windows Azure reporting $1 billion in revenue as well, our partners are in a prime position to support this. “This research validates our belief that the most successful partners are the ones who are offering a hybrid approach to IT. Microsoft is the only vendor equipped to help partners offer their customers a suite of on-premises and cloud solutions in both public and private cloud environments. By offering a hybrid approach, it better addresses customer needs and in turn, helps our partners make more money.”
Chris Dunning, CEO of TechQuarters, a Microsoft cloud partner, told eWEEK selling hybrid solutions is key to his company’s success.
“Before I setup TechQuarters, my previous business used to sell lots of Small Business Servers, now TechQuarters is highly addicted to decommissioning them in many SMBs,” Dunning said. “Our solution gives SMBs a decision, depending upon their present setup. We generally migrate email to Office 365 and some data to SharePoint, then we decide on whether to keep some data locally or place it on either a private Virtual Cloud Server with TechQuarters or Windows Azure.”
Meanwhile, for his part, Nick Vossburg, CEO of Cloudbearing, another Microsoft cloud partner, said Cloudbearing also supports organizations that rely on public cloud services but also maintain on-premise operations for workloads such as line of business applications.

“Some of Cloudbearing’s customers want to take advantage of the public cloud’s scalability and cost-effectiveness, but prefer to maintain other types of data on premises,” Vossburg said. “However, when it comes to email, collaboration software, and document management solutions, we find many customers eager to off load the expense of on premise operations to a more stable, secure, and cost effective solution with Microsoft. Cloud computing, both private and public, is fundamentally shifting the IT industry and a primary driver of that trend is economics. We anticipate by 2018 we will see cloud computing as the industry standard for common IT workloads like email.”

Microsoft’s WPC, with more than 15,000 attendees, is Microsoft’s largest event annually, and once again this year, the cloud will weigh heavily in the messaging. Microsoft has been driving hard at cloud services for many years, having started off with the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) five years ago. The company has since moved strongly into Office 365 in the last year and a half. And over this last year, the terminology Microsoft is using is that it is now a devices and services company. And services are clearly cloud services.
Roskill said Microsoft multi-billion dollar performance in cloud related revenue signifies tremendous momentum entering the new fiscal year and partners are trailing along for the ride.
“Organizations are moving to the Microsoft Cloud at a very fast rate, and we are growing rapidly due to that shift,” Vossburg said. “Microsoft is a supportive partner to partners like Cloudbearing. Microsoft provides key benefits to its cloud partners like internal-use software rights, training, partner support, and exposure to customers in their product directories. Microsoft approaches cloud services as a way to help customers move toward better business agility, economics, and experiences both inside and outside their company walls.”